NAB

Background

My first stint at NAB when I joined Bound (then known as Our Very Own) the consultancy was only a year old and much of the team was consulting full-time at NAB. I joined a team under the PO Courtney and we’ve since become great friends.

The team’s goal was to foster third-party relationships (in this instance Xero and Slyp) by conceiving and testing new features for the NAB app. NAB has established a strong reputation as leading the banking industry with a benchmark pair of mobile applications for iOS and Android users.

Specifically, I lead the design, prototyping, and testing of Xero integrations with the NAB app. These would enable payroll and incoming/outgoing funds forecasting for small business customers. These customers already depend on various apps for day-to-day business needs - we saw an opportunity to bring these together.

Approach

I knew that brand-new features such as those we'd planned to develop would require rigorous testing. We developed prototypes using NAB's GEL (Global Experience Language) and set about testing them. To prepare I produced the following:

• End-to-end screen design flows to demonstrate the proposed solution.
• Test plans, scripts, and surveys for use during the in-person usability test sessions.
• A sophisticated HTML prototype of the proposed solution. Built using some javascript to simulate the financial calculations the eventual feature might need...

Prototype

It's interactive, give it a try!

Outcomes

Starting with known attitudes of small business owners and customers (from ours as well as prior research) we focused tests on the cash position, history and forecast functionality. Based on a variety of pain points regarding planning and budgeting being a major frustration for business owners we received overwhelmingly positive sentiments from user testing participants. Most compelling was our data visualisation of incoming money (invoices being paid by their clients) which would give them greater confidence and visibility over their own finance in the near future.

Nota bene

Owing to the sensitive nature of this project, dealing with banking IP, I can only address the specifics of the work in general terms. The supporting visuals have been reconstructed by me for illustrative purposes only and don't represent artefacts taken from NAB.